Tag Archives: paul krugman

Monday’s Rachel Maddow Show started off with one of those meandering historical backgrounders, and as sometimes happens, that intro is in some ways even more interesting than the main story.
It’s all about another tell-all by a former cabinet member, Donald Regan’s 1988 book in which the bitter former Reagan chief of staff revealed that just about every major decision in the Reagan White House was affected by Nancy Reagan’s consultations with an astrologer. It’s a glorious trip down WTF lane that leaves you astonished at just how much the Cult of Reagan was willing to overlook. These weren’t just sketchy rumors from some third-rate tabloid about the president maybe being a Muslim (because he pronounces “Pakistan” with un-American syllables), but actual reliance on occult hoodoo nonsense that teevee evangelists regularly decry as flirting with demons and witchcraft. But Reagan was Reagan, so sure, Nancy’s astrologer got to decide the daily schedule for the Leader of the Free World.
Read more on Rachel Maddow Reminds Us Of That Time Nancy Reagan’s Astrologer Ran The White House (Video)…

If you’re a top-flight columnist, you get some perks in addition to a flattering photo next to your byline, like interns and assistants and stuff, people who can take care of the boring details that might get in the way of your creative genius. Or if you’re David Brooks, they take care of the boring details that get in the way of writing whatever blandly conservative-tinged both-sides-need-to-be-reasonable twaddle you’re slopping together today. And thanks to an interview with Katie Couric on the Yahoo News, we learn today that Our Mister Brooks doesn’t read the online comments on his columns, because they’re just too painful:
“I used to read them, but it was just too psychologically damaging,” Brooks said of the comments. “So then I would ask my assistant to read them.”
We can’t really blame him, since the help is available, and we’d agree that people on the interwebs can be pretty darn mean! But there’s just something about David Brooks saying it that makes him sound especially whinydouchey, no? Read more on David Brooks Too Delicate To Read Internet Comments…

Professional Eddie Munster imitator Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan had to be feeling pretty pleased with himself yesterday, raining all over B. Barry Bamz’s football-spikin’ party with a new 10-year budget proposal. Ryan’s lil’ April Fool’s Day prank would slash domestic spending by nearly 30 percent by 2024 (BIFF!), bump up Pentagon spending WAY over current budgets (POW!) and … wait for it … repeal Obamacare and make Medicare a voucher program for private health insurance (FLAWLESS VICTORY!).
So, the screeching monkey wing of the Republican party had to be pretty chuffed about Ryan’s swan song budget, as he prepares to step up from the Budget Committee to obstruct run the Ways and Means Committee as chairman, right? WRONG, you are WRONG, libtard Wonket reader person, they are the opposite of chuffed!*
You see, unless you grab aholt of the wheel and steer the budget Titanic directly INTO the iceberg, you are a RINO and just Part Of The Problem. Ask Sarah Palin, who took to the Tea Party version of the Wall Street Journal editorial page (Facebook) to blast Ryan with words, that she undoubtedly wrote herself because just read them. Read more on Sarah Palin Literally Scourges And Crucifies Paul Ryan For Not Hating Poors Hard Enough…

After nearly a week, the poutrage over that Coca-Cola ad in wrong languages hasn’t abated much. Jon Stewart wonders what the fuss was about — possibly the ad’s “dangerous levels of schmaltz”? No, it’s all that scary foreign talk in an ad with a bunch of brown people. How dare they desecrate our national anthem! And so The Daily Show takes on the complete idiocy of complaining that there’s something un-American about the iconography of “attractive immigrants” (and Native Americans, but let’s not quibble — non-English equals furrin) singing “America the Beautiful” while drinking Coca-Cola.
Read more on Jon Stewart Wants To Know Why All These Euro-Americans Are Freaked Out By That Coke Ad…

It was a Meltdown in Metropolis, a Rumble in the Concrete Jungle on Monday night when Charlie Rose hosted Paul Krugman and Joe Scarborough for a battle royale for the crown of World’s Greatest Economics Expert Guy! Who would win? Would it be the avuncular and learned Dr. Krugman, an Ivy League professor who holds an actual Nobel Prize for Economics, or would it be the failed Congressman from America’s Dingus who most people know these days as “that guy on morning TV whose facial expression makes him look like nothing so much as an angry pit bull that was just neutered”? Your Wonket could not watch this death match live last night, so we will retroactively live-bloog it this afternoon because we woke up feeling dangerously optimistic about the world. Read more on Retroactively Liveblooging The Paul Krugman-Joe Scarborough Steel Cage Death Match Of Death…

OK, the bad news is that so in order to watch Paul Krugman, you have to first endure Paul Ryan (R-Pissant) and his smarmy little mug, but don’t worry, the good news is he goes away pretty quickly!
But then — and this is more bad news — he is replaced by another idiot (Morning Joe) and Ed Rendell, who we have come not to like so much now that he is chairing the corporate-sponsored “Fix the Debt” campaign.
So anyway the video begins with Joe and whatshername asking Paul Krugman what the hell is going on in Spain. No, not as in “why is there 50% youth unemployment” but as in, “why are they buying your book over in Spain and also in Japan?” Important questions indeed.
Read more on Paul Krugman Brings Facts To Ideology Fight…

On Friday, Ben Bernanke delivered a speech at Jackson Hole, in which he either said something that was very good news, or alternatively, said something very disappointing and you should get used to eating cat food and stealing WiFi. But which is it? Very good or very disappointing? And how screwed are we? So many tough questions! But do not worry — all questions will be answered because as always, your Wonkette is here to help! Herewith, a breakdown of Bernanke’s Jackson Hole presentation, and exactly how it relates to you and how screwed you are and probably will keep being for awhile. OH AND HAPPY LABOR DAY.
Read more on Your Labor Day Explainer Of Why None Of Us Have Jobs…

What is Paul Ryan’s biggest mistake, you might be wondering — and yes, we know! It’s hard to pick just one! But if, for some reason, we were going to try, would we pick Ryan’s sponsorship of a personhood amendment? Or maybe the Ryan Plan, which would turn Medicare into a voucher program? Or oh — what about saying that voting for the Iraq War gave him “more foreign policy experience than Obama”? No, stupid, it was none of those things, it was refusing to vote for the Simpsons-Bowles Proposal, as David Brooks explains to us in a column called “Ryan’s Biggest Mistake.”
Read more on Oh Paul Ryan, David Brooks Can’t Stay Mad At You!…

If you went to high school in the past ten years, you may have seen an Ad Council poster hung somewhere that said you will make millions of more dollars over your lifetime if you earn a college degree than if you merely finish high school. Never mind that the same federal government that printed those posters won’t provide you this four years of extra education it seems to find so crucial; in fact, it would be happy to help you go tens of thousands of dollars in debt you will never be able to pay off. But this burgeoning wage cushion the college-educated once enjoyed no longer exists. And soon there will no longer be nearly any magical middle-class “knowledge economy” jobs for college graduates, because robots are coming to take those too. And it turns out the robots are even better at that than they were at manufacturing! Read more on Don’t Go To College; All Those ‘Good’ Jobs Are Being Taken By Robots Too…

There’s basically no national or ethnic group you can make fun of these days without being accused of racism, but a few are considered mildly less offensive than others. For example, you can always call Scots “stabby,” because they love to stab each other for sport, and Belgians are usually fair game, too, due to their treacherousness and love of mayonnaise. But as Paul Krugman discovered last week, you do not get away with insulting the Swiss. Read more on Krugman Retracts Anti-Swiss SMEAR…

EVERYONE CHUG THIS CUP OF SADNESS: Here’s a great and brilliant article from the new Atlantic about how the United States is a banana republic after years of terrible policies and stuff. It is probably too long for “blog readers” so just read a paragraph or two every night before sleep and someday you’ll finish! Also, Newsweek has a cover story about how Paul Krugman hates Obama but remains LOYAL for he is the king, after all. It includes a very funny picture of Krugman complaining about the rain. [Atlantic, Newsweek]
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KRUGMAN GIVES UP: Don’t worry, Paul Krugman! Once you accept the Hobo Jungle as an inevitability, you can start to plan your life there. And it’s still early. There are many spacious trash mounds left to stake out — some real steals. Get one near a sewer! You can fish for your own rats, which will be both the preferred food and currency within the Hobo Jungle. [Paul Krugman]
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Watch out, America, because David Brooks has written another one of his famous “theme” columns, in which he takes on a gimmick — like pretending to be Kierkegaard, or a doctor researching some new Obama disease, or a cartoon Asian Buddhist Negro being attacked by the Internet — and proceeds to embarrass himself for hundreds of words. Today he pretends to be a historian, or maybe just a Wikipedia writer, composing a brief summary of how during the Obama years, the majority party took a so-so economy, ran up the budget and made so many bad decisions that the American people started distrusting the government and other institutions of power completely. Just to repeat, he says this is what the future will look like. Read more on David Brooks Writes Terrifying History Of Obama’s America…

All the libtards who watched Paul Krugman go cross-eyed with frustration on This Week yesterday as he tried to explain very simple economic terms and concepts to Sam Donaldson and Carly Fiorina may get a kick out of his column this morning. Clearly Paul just wandered off the set and in a fit of squirmy, nerdish pique typed out this thing declaring that anyone who says dumb things about the stimulus package is a lying fraud. Read more on Paul Krugman’s Angry Screed About Stimulus Haters…

THIS WAS WHY PAUL KRUGMAN DID NOT WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE: “Now, as we survey the wreckage and try to understand how things can have gone so wrong, so fast, the answer is actually quite simple: What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff.” [NYT]
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The New York Times‘ Nobel laureate beardclown Paul Krugman has quite a Keynes Boner in this morning’s column. He wants the Obama administration to flood as much money as possible into the government and not to be dandies about Debt. You know that famous socialist president FDR? Well he was a pussy: “One of these prejudices is the fear of red ink. In normal times, it’s good to worry about the budget deficit — and fiscal responsibility is a virtue we’ll need to relearn as soon as this crisis is past. When depression economics prevails, however, this virtue becomes a vice. F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget in 1937 almost destroyed the New Deal.” Sure! If the Chinese will pay for Obama’s non-lame New Deal, then hey, why not, rock ‘n’ roll, where’s my refundable tax credit already? [NYT]
Read more on Paul Krugman Wants To Spend So Much Money, For Fun…

How did tenacious Hillary Clinton supporter and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman congratulate Barack Obama’s nomination? He didn’t! “Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America,” Krugman opens today’s column. “With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.” Uh oh! It seems we’re dealing with a douchebag here. Read more on Paul Krugman, For The Love Of God, Get Over Yourself…

It’s hard not to feel a little bad for Paul Krugman and Sean Wilentz, Princeton’s two Big Time academics who seem hell-bent on going down with the Good Ship Clinton when the real party’s somewhere else. Wilentz, a famous American historian, has moved on from spitting at Obama for playing the race card, but now is saying that if the Democratic party had completely different rules, and the primaries were counted one way and not another, Hillary would obviously win and therefore she should:
Read more on Hillary Supporter Wilentz Should Stop Talking, Writing…

Now that Barack Obama’s victory appears pretty likely, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman must be drinking alone in his apartment, even though he knows the Obama health care plan will not cover his psoriasis later in life. Get well soon, you sad panda. Anyway, guess what “lightning rod conservative” columnist Bill Kristol thinks about Barack Obama’s hatred of America?
Read more on Bill Kristol Column Worse Than Non-Existent Krugman Column…

New York Times‘ health care columnist Paul Krugman wrote a column today, it being a Friday and such, and it’s about our flourishing economy. But the real Paul Krugman, the whiny ex-Nobel contender we’ve enjoyed so thoroughly this Democratic primary season, offered his juiciest insight in a brief blog post this morning: one time the Times edited him! Since when does the Times edit Krugman (or anyone else)?
Read more on Evil NYT Police State ‘Censoring’ Paul Krugman…